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Communications professionals face immense demands to continuously produce content across multiple platforms and channels. Generative AI is emerging as a game-changing technology to automate certain communications tasks and boost productivity.
For marketing, PR, social media, and other communications professionals, generative AI enables drafting press releases, website copy, social posts, presentation materials, and more. While human creativity is still essential, AI can handle initial content creation to save time. In this article, we explore 5 key applications of AI to make your communications efforts more efficient.
As a communications professional, you spend a lot of your day drafting, revising, and repurposing press releases, website copy, social media posts, emails, and other content across multiple platforms and regions. This constant content creation can be tedious and time consuming, and you often need content quicker than you’re able to create it.
Generative AI can help you automate initial content drafting to significantly accelerate communications workflows.
For example, if you need to create a series of social media posts, you could provide prompts like:
You could then quickly take the AI generated post drafts, choose the best ones, edit for tone and branding, and schedule social posting. This allows rapidly creating a high volume of customized social content.
For other types of content, like press releases, website pages, and emails, you can leverage AI in the same way to automate initial drafts for review and editing. Similarly, this provides a huge time savings compared to manually creating content from scratch. This allows you to spend more time focusing on strategy rather than drafting multiple versions of similar content.
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In addition to creating content, you spend a lot of your time creating presentation materials both for in-house and external uses. Creating these decks—especially when you need to tailor similar material to individual clients—can be very repetitive.
Instead of making these decks from scratch, you can provide prompts to have AI generate initial slide outlines by giving the key topics, narratives, data points, and talking points to cover.
For example, if you’re a PR manager preparing an internal update for your team, you could assign the following:
"Please create a 10 slide presentation deck for our upcoming employee town hall covering: 1) 2021 financial results, 2) New product launch, 3) Expansion plans, 4) DE&I update. Include relevant charts and statistics from our fiscal year report."
The AI would then create a draft presentation with simple titles and first draft bullet points for each slide based on the provided narrative. This gives you a starting point to go through and refine messaging, brand slides, create or update visuals and charts, and ensure cohesive flow.
Similarly, for presentations with heavy data, you can further prompt AI to "Create a chart comparing 2022 sales by region" or "Generate a pie chart showing market share of top competitors”, saving you the time it would take to create the chart yourself.
Leveraging generative AI to draft presentations saves hours of manual drafting and research time for communications teams. The human touch is still essential for strategy and customization but AI accelerates the heavy lifting.
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Keeping fully updated on news and trends related to one's company, competitors, and industry is extremely important but highly challenging for communications teams without AI. Manually monitoring hundreds of media sites, publications, blogs, social networks, and other sources daily consumes massive amounts of time and resources—which you often don’t have.
Generative AI can rapidly scan thousands of sources across news, print, digital, video, podcasts and more to highlight the most relevant emerging stories and developments each day.
You can provide prompts to focus the AI on customized topics such as auditing results and summarizing key news over a period related to a company or its competitors, finding recent coverage related to earnings, or identifying top media mentions and articles after a product launch.
This way, it allows you to start each day with a personalized news briefing to stay efficiently updated on the latest trends, events, and media narratives that may impact messaging and strategy. It saves many hours otherwise spent on constant research and enables your team to more quickly adapt strategies based on emerging topics, events, and opportunities uncovered by the AI.
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To get to know your customers, you are likely conducting frequent surveys, interviews, and focus groups. While these insights are incredibly useful, analyzing all the qualitative data from scratch is incredibly tedious and time-consuming.
Generative AI can automate this process by reviewing the raw survey responses, interview transcripts, and focus group material to identify key takeaways, quotes, and insights for communicators.
For example, after a customer satisfaction survey, you could prompt the AI:
"Please analyze these 500 customer survey responses and interview transcripts. Identify the most common themes, feedback, and insights related to product satisfaction, features, and support. Summarize the key takeaways in a two-page brief."
The AI would synthesize the qualitative data into a report highlighting the most prevalent findings such as satisfaction with consumer support, requested features, drivers of dissatisfaction, and more. This would enable efficiently summarizing hundreds of pages of stakeholder feedback into key insights for action.
You can then take this analysis to inform messaging and content development focused on the issues and themes stakeholders care most about, allowing you more time to put a PR strategy into action.
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As a part of media monitoring, you often need to compile key statistics, metrics, and examples into reports for executives, investors, and other stakeholders. This requires manually gathering the latest data on items like website traffic, social media engagement, press mentions, email performance, event participation, and other metrics.
Generative AI can automate pulling this data and generating full report drafts through prompts, asking the AI to generate a report for the CEO by reviewing traffic sources, social media analytics, media mentions, email click throughs, event participation, and more.
Your team can then review the draft, refine the messaging, add additional examples and context, brand the report, and finalize it for leadership. With the ability to produce report drafts on demand, your team can scale executive reporting and demonstrate impact more efficiently, allowing you more time to craft a compelling story from that data.
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While the above are some of the most practical uses for AI in communications, Generative AI uses will only continue to evolve and make work more efficient in the future.
For more information on the future of Generative AI, we invite you to view our LexisNexis® Future of Work Report 2024: How Generative AI is Shaping the Future of Work to explore more of ways Generative AI is changing the landscape.